Dear Editor,
I look around and ask why are there so many problems, problems that seem insuperable, and which keep mounting relentlessly. Slowly, but surely, the damning answer comes. It is that there is a staggering lack of love for this country where it matters, that makes patriotism a laughable thought, something that is an anachronism and now meaningless. I dare to say it. Just observe and discern.
Political people are among the most spectacularly successful citizens in this country, when measured in pure dollar terms. Their primary interests and objectives are seizing the opportunity, grabbing the hog, and draining to the last drops, too. Like a pit bull, they chew every financial bone to dust, and refuse to let go, even when there is nothing left. There is no such thing as enough. Patriotism, that secular faith, that transcendent standard, induces scornful merriment from those living knee-deep in plunder.
There are the supposed servant-leaders who serve themselves with grotesque abandon, and lead the way in trampling citizens, while sucking every drop of milk from a ravaged land. Servants give; this is about exploitation through taking; patriotism is about giving of oneself, while leading in Guyana is about being first in line to raid the national piggybank. Greed, insatiable greed, and an unprecedented local addiction to money are the chief dogmas of this unholy domestic political religion and its high priests and worshippers.
There are still others covered with the same unpatriotic skin, like the political scavengers; their scales glisten in telling self-incrimination. Like the politicos, they talk a good game, then they intellectualize and pontificate publicly; but it is all a mental exercise. The heart is not there, nowhere. If the wounded soul of the heart, the burning emotional commitment, is a still, unfeeling blob, then it is only lip, all lip. Thus there is the shallowness of necessary public postures.
Try the churchmen, self-described civil society, the luminous punditocracy, and it is the same story: all head, no heart; all sound, no soul. Observe the rush for prestige, the steady tableau of the self-promotional, and the quest for financial nirvana. It is a business; a cold, calculating hustle of personal enterprise. Reward with something and silence follows.
It is dismal and damning. Those who wish to challenge should first ask: what has been given up? What is expected, yearned for? Really yearned for? At bottom, it is all about what is in for me? How to capitalize? The humility of serving and washing feet is an endangered species, lost art, a thing of the past.
Certainly, there are those few who love this place and function beyond call; they do so unrewarded and unheralded. They are a beleaguered bunch, amusing if not pitied. They tarry on quietly. At the same time, the plight of the poor and the destitution of the national spirit are of minimal significance for the players, and those on the take. For them there is no such thing as country, or love of country; only the opportunities to make a killing again and again.
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall
